Despite His Generous Over Income Nigel Farage Taps Up Ukip Funds, taking 10% of the money to pay for a chauffer also the party pays for him to have body guards (for effect).

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Hi,

clearly it is fair to say, especially when Nigel farage lied on national media about never employing family members and subsequently employed his wife at almost £30,000 a year and nw that employing wives is not permitted by the EU has given her work ostensibly working for one of his lackeys who he placed as an MEP!

With these displays of dishonesty it is little wonder that members of Ukip have consistently criticised him and his cronies for not producing open and transparent accounts.

Nigel Farage is clearly and repeatedly on record assuring members that he will provide transparent accounts year after year but never once has he honoured his promises – but then again Nigel Farage has consistently displayed a low cunning and a total lack of integrity.

Many will remember the huge amount of money that went missing on his watch relative to the Ashford Call Center, which is just one example of his duplicity and we have all read Douglas Denny’s resignation letter in which he clearly states he has unequivocal evidence of Nigel Farage’s criminal behaviour. After all Denny should know he was a major player in Farage’s team of dishonest and sordid fixers over many years.

Of course Douglas Denny is cleaqrly involved in criminality having stated he has clear evidence of crimes having been committed that would lead to the prosecution of Nigel Farage we note he had failed to report the matter and seemingly seeks to capitalise on his crimes by touting the stories around to the media.

Many of the media have already made it clear they will not pay thus collude in profiting from crime. I gather from a couple of sources, though I have no documentary evidence, that Denny, being the idiot he always has been, is claiming he is in some way indemnified by leaking info. to The Times which I should imagine is annoying The Times as not only would they not do that but it is beyond their remit!

Anyway to get back to The Times, here is their story, which is hidden behind a paywall so you may wish to either sign up or buy today’s edition to check the original article!

Impoverished Ukip gives Farage £60,000 to spend on chauffeur

Nigel Farage continues to receive the chauffeur allowance and since last spring, Ukip has been paying for bodyguardsJoel Goodman/LNP

Ukip is “very, very short of money” and has failed to build up a war chest for the general election yet has still granted Nigel Farage a £60,000 annual chauffeur allowance,The Timescan reveal.

Stuart Wheeler, the spread-betting millionaire who has bankrolled the party for years and who served as treasurer until July this year, said Ukip “desperately needs more money”.

Ukip had only £600,000 in the bank at the start of 2014, according to its accounts, and needs several million pounds to fight a successful nationwide general election campaign. Having broken into the political mainstream with the recent by-election wins, it plans to contest every constituency but will focus efforts on 40 target seats.

Although it has secured a number of sizeable donations in the past year, the money has largely been spent on this spring’s European election campaign and on recent by-elections.

Major donors have been allowed to spend their money on pet projects, including private polling, focus groups and direct marketing, rather than handing it over to Ukip’s central office.

“I’m fairly sure that we are very, very short of money,” Mr Wheeler said. “Nigel Farage ideally would like six or seven million to run a perfect general election campaign. It will be a hell of a job, but we will do the very best we can to raise a good proportion of that.”

Despite its unsteady finances, internal documents show that Ukip’s governing committee granted a “Nigel Farage expense allowance” of £60,000 a year from September 2013.

Hugh Williams, Ukip’s registered treasurer, said the money was “because he needs a chauffeur to drive him around the place”, and covered the driver’s salary and motoring costs. “It was totally necessary and there was no hesitation about granting it,” he said.

Mr Williams said the Ukip leader was continuing to receive the chauffeur allowance and that, since last spring, the party had been paying for bodyguards. “We realised when he needed security, we just had to pay for it whatever the bills were,” he said.

Former officials said they were not aware of Mr Farage having received significant amounts of party money previously, and one said that Ukip was “very short of money at the time”.

According to a party budget drawn up in August last year, Ukip expected to have just under £370,000 available for elections last year, £60,000 less than during the previous year.

The Lib Dems, the smallest of the other three major parties, spent almost £5 million at the 2010 general election.

Ukip also had to bear the cost of paying several staff who had previously been funded by EU staffing allowances.

Pete Reeve, a Ukip regional organiser in the east of England, was previously employed on the staffing allowance of Stuart Agnew, the MEP. He has been paid a £28,000 salary by Ukip since September last year, while Steve Crowther, the party chairman, began receiving a £36,000 salary at the same time.

Alexandra Phillips, a press officer, began receiving her £60,000 salary in April 2013. She had previously been paid with EU funds as she was employed by the European Parliament’s EFD group, of which Ukip was a member.

The party also hired Tim Aker as head of policy on £62,000 a year in June 2013. He was elected as an MEP last May, but retains his policy role. In the past year, Ukip has attracted several significant donations but one contributor admitted that wealthy Eurosceptics were reluctant to accept the scrutiny and attention that came with it. “That’s probably still the biggest bar that we face,” he said.

The party has allowed donors to retain control over how their money is used. Paul Sykes, who has given £1.3 million out of the £2.3 million Ukip has reported receiving in donations this year, spent all of the money on a billboard campaign during the European elections. He recently said he did not expect to make further donations and said he was “encouraging all the constituencies to start raising funds so we can be less reliant on major donors”.

A recent attempt to raise money through the crowdfunding software Nationbuilder has brought in £80,000 in small donations and the party has increased revenue from subscriptions. It now has around 41,000 members, each paying between £2 and £30 a year.

Last night, a Ukip spokesman said: “Ukip has over the past year won a national election, gained its first two Westminster seats at by-elections, increased its number of councillors by over 50 per cent and increased its membership by more than 50 per cent, not a bad year considering your concerns over our ability to fight elections.”

• A Ukip MEP was at the centre of an international spat last night after plans to host Egypt’s most senior Muslim cleric were left in tatters. Amjad Bashir, Ukip’s communities spokesman, had invited MPs, peers and diplomats to an audience with the Grand Mufti in London on Friday. However, a spokesman for Shawqi Ibrahim Abdel-Karim Allamclaimed that he had never agreed to take part in the event on youth radicalisation. The MEP said that the event would still go ahead with other guests.

You may be interested in the details of the spat with Egypt’s Grand Mufti:

I do have a feeling that some of the dots were not joined up on this fanciful idea and have little doubt that had he attended, minded of Ukip’s racist track record, it could well have ended catastrophically with some fool like Gerard Batten demanding he sign an undertaking to do as he was told!

Ukip’s track record on race is at best unpleasant and we note even Nick griffin aims to vote for them and much of their recent gain in members has coincided with the collapse of the BNP!

Perhaps more people should read their extremist Immigration Policy Document:

& follow the odious machinations of Gerard Batten:

whose views on Islam and policies likely to cause racial insightment based on thinly disguised anti Islamic beliefs would seem most likely to be based upon his own superstitions that hark back to the odious earlier pamphlets associated with Ukip as produced by Tony Bennett, which branded the profet Mohammed as a paedophile!

Gerard Batten’s views and superstitions are likely to be heavily imnflueenced by his Phillipino wife’s beliefs which would doubtless have been through her upbringing under the doctrine of Cardinal Sin in the Phillipines of the day!

Ukip with its implausible exploitation of tokenistic parading of members based on their ethnicity or beliefs seem not to realise just how racist such behaviour is as with a ‘Friends of Israel’, ‘Friends of Palestine’ and other such groups it just prostitutes the party in a seeming effort at unprincipled grab at populism either for cash or a few naive and ill informed votes!

A writer claiming to be Peter Evans, a former UK news editor of The Times, writes in the comments section of the latest story on Ukip, complaining of the paper’s campaign to undermine Ukip in a way which it does not do to the Tory Party.

Whether he is genuine we have no means of knowing, although he does not seem to have a web footprint. And it seems hardly likely that a man of the stature of a former news editor would be reduced to making his views known in the comments section of his erstwhile employer.

The piece is of note, however, in that it represents a split between those who applaud The Times for opening up Ukip to scrutiny and those who complain that it is being criticised. Of the latter, many certainly do tend to harbour the view that the party should get a free pass from the media, no matter how crass its behaviour.

Nevertheless, it should not be necessary to say that political parties should undergo the most rigorous of scrutiny, and that must include Ukip. It is in receipt of substantial funds from the taxpayer – it is in a position to affect the outcome of the general election, and it is upon this party that many rest their hopes of leaving the EU.

This blog, of course, has a special interest in Ukip – aside from the personal. Whatever its many detractors might aver, it would be absurd for a blog of this nature not to take a keen interest in a party which claims as its main objective our withdrawal from the EU.

So it is that for the second day running that The Times is running hostile coverage of Ukip, and we find ourselves mirroring that coverage.

The essence of the first of two stories is that, despite its high profile and the support of some wealthy donors, the party is “very, very short of money” and has failed to build up a war chest for the general election. Yet, we are told, it has still granted Nigel Farage a £60,000 annual chauffeur allowance.

It might also have added that this matches the annual chauffeur allowance awarded to Farage by the European Parliament, in recognition of his position as group leader, complete with a top-of-the-range Mercedes limousine, for his personal use. Man of the people, Farage may present himself as, but he has no intention of being one of them.

This story also gets some coverage in the Financial Times, which also notes that Ukip also pays for a six-man security detail to protect The Great Leader, despite the party having received less than £100,000 in donations for the third quarter of this year.

Such matters, of course, pale into insignificance compared with the news that departing Council President Van Rompuy is to be paid £133,723 a year – 55 per cent of his basic salary – until December 2017, on top of his annual Brussels pension of £52,000, plus a £21,000 one-off payment, taking his earnings to £578,000 over the next three years.

Nonetheless, like most human beings, we are able to process details on more than one issue at a time. That one is important doesn’t mean that the other isn’t.

The detail of the Ukip stories indicate that the party is having a far harder time building the funds needed to fight an effective general election campaign, for which it estimates it needs six or seven million. But of as great an interest is the second story in The Times, headed “Inside Nigel’s house of cards”.

This starts with the legend that “Nigel Farage is trying to create a professional party from a ragtag group more accustomed to setting the world to rights over pints of real ale”, thereby demonstrating that, for all resource expenditure on tracking Ukip and Mr Farage, it doesn’t even begin to understand the subject on which it is reporting.

At the heart of the party’s failure to professionalise is, in fact, none other than Mr Farage, the Lord of Misrule. He personally has gone out of his way to undermine any part of the party that could constitute an alternative power base, which might provide a platform to challenge his grip on the party.

That, in the past, has included the party’s head office. Thus, it comes as no surprise to learn from the Times’s story that after Ukip had moved into a new Mayfair office, a Ukip “director” had drafted a less than favourable report on it, writing of being “embarrassed” at “the lack of cleanliness, silliness and lack of organisation and lack of people in offices”.

This came a few days after another attempt to professionalise the party had ended in disaster, when Will Gilpin, a former RAF pilot, had begun work in the £72,000-a-year post of chief executive in December 2012 but had been sacked in August 2013.

He subsequently wrote to one member of the executive: “I’m afraid I came to the role in the belief it was actually a chief executive they were after, rather than chairman’s assistant”, exactly mirroring my experience when, after leaving, I complained of being treated as a “bag carrier”. Neither Farage nor the party have any idea of how to use professional staff.

But then of special interest is the tale of Tim Aker, a “political campaigner and former researcher”, who was put forward for the £62,000 post of head of policy. William Dartmouth, a Ukip MEP and wind farms supporter, apparently wrote to members of the NEC complaining that Mr Aker was being offered as the sole candidate, despite having been “directly concerned [with] and therefore partly responsible for the embarrassment of the 2010 Ukip general election manifesto”.

That Aker survived and has gone on to become an MEP is seen as entirely due to the personal support of Mr Farage, even though he has disowned the 2010 manifesto as “drivel” and claimed he had never read it.

Dartmouth had dismissed the manifesto as “electorally toxic” and avers that Mr Aker’s involvement with it should be a “total disqualification” for the post of head of policy. That, though, is to misunderstand the way Mr Farage thinks.

When Andrew Moncreiff, a member of Ukip’s national executive committee, wrote that Mr Aker was “harmless enough but thoroughly lightweight and has done virtually nothing for the party”, he was perhaps unwittingly setting out the perfect qualification for someone occupying high office in Ukip – thereby ensuring that they will never mount an effective challenge to The Great Leader.

This, of course, is what the supporters of the cult-like Ukip are wilfully failing to see. Ukip is a multi-million-pound operation, with several hundred staff – paid and volunteers – yet it consistently underperforms.

At the heart of its failure is one man, a charismatic figure who can attract the support of weak people looking for leadership, but is unable to organise or deliver an effective party machine and who devotes much of his energy to preventing anyone else achieving that which he cannot do.

As to the possibility of rescuing the party from the grip of this man, many hopes are pinned on Douglas Carswell. Popcorn has been purchased in industrial quantities in anticipation of the coming joust between two “titans” as they struggle for the leadership of the party.

It seems likely that, if Carswell regains his seat at the general election while Farage fails to score – which also seems likely – then the MP will be in pole position to displace the current leader. Small wonder, therefore, that we are already hearing rumours that relations between the two men are “frosty”, with communications having completely broken down.

Despite having gone full Ukip, Carswell does at least have some pretensions to intellectual rigour, with the publication of The Plan. He also worked for the Conservative Party’s Policy Unit, helping prepare the manifesto for the 2005 general election – which the Conservative Party failed to win.

However, Mr Carswell’s work has less coherence than his skill at self-promotion might suggest, and his current idea for an EU exit plan remains seeking “a Swiss-style bilateral free-trade agreement”.

Those hoping that Mr Carswell might provide us with an intellectually invigorated Ukip, therefore, might be disappointed, although it comes clearer by the day that Farage’s failure to embrace policy is causing the party considerable damage. Something, as the say, must be done – but it is unlikely to happen before the general election.

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